Well, I was going to start off with a cheeky "Well, that didn't go great!" but given this past week, there's no way I'd expect anyone to immediately get that it was a cheeky callback reference to last week's blog. That was about soccer, to be clear. And I was about to say "...which nobody is worried about anymore," but eh, after getting bounced from an international tournament that we are hosting at the group stage just two years before the World Cup that we are also hosting, some people are still pretty heavily thinking about it.
I'm less worried about that whole debacle because debacles, well, we're stackin' 'em deep and sellin' 'em cheap this summer. Some of us probably haven't even noticed that we've decided to have the earliest giant-ass category five hurricane ever in a summer storm season. American media won't be allowed to lead with this on the news until it threatens some high-level shareholders' third property beach homes, but it looks like if it does make landfall here, it's headed for unfashionable southern Texas, so odd are it won't make the news at all. Or if it does, Fox News will find an elegant way to blame hurricanes on illegal immigration, just as they do all crime, unemployment, inflation, deflation, taxes, abortion, budget deficits, not having a big enough military, deteriorating infrastructure, most of the crimes Donald Trump actually did, people watching too much soccer, car accidents, erectile dysfunction... basically everything except cancer, which everyone knows is actually caused by wind power turbines. Plus if you can make the immigrants=hurricanes thing stick, you've also deflected from the idea of climate change as well, so it's a two-for-one. I for one can't wait to see them try. And they will definitely try. I wish I were kidding.
Speaking of xenophobia, in France, the almost inexplicable call for a snap election has resulted in the far-right National Rally leading the first round of elections, spurring panic and reshuffling of left-wing parties and candidates to try to blunt what seems like an inevitable (but first-ever) control of parliament by a political party built around the idea that French people who practice Islam shouldn't be able to wear the hijab because, well, you could be hiding anything in there, couldn't you? Throw in some light(?) anti-semitism, some euroskepticism and a whole lot of anti-immigrant fervor and you've got a pretty basic western populist movement happening. I've met French people, including some French academics, who find America mystifying and would find it impossible that a country that includes a whole-ass Sorbonne would be exactly as likely to fall for this redneck bullshit. Admittedly it does sound cooler when you say les cous rouges, but it means the same scary-ass thing.
The UK election seems like it's going to go a lot better, but this is them (probably? It's still happening...) getting it sort of right after having a right-wing government for 14 years that had achieved the biggest win for any revanchist political movement in the western world with the UK exit from the European Union. The word "win" there is used advisedly as it seems to have exacerbated every single effect of the economic struggles of the last 4-5 years in the UK, leading to an out-of-control spiraling of the cost of living and a level of economic hardship among the general public not seen since the end of World War II. To be clear, that's when a lot of the shit they needed to make stuff was all rubble because of bombs. All they had to do to make that a reality again was indulge the dreams of Nigel Farage, a bumbling xenophobia-is-a-personality dipshit who should only be famous for getting milkshakes thrown on him in public. He's spent most of his public career as a punchline, sort of the British equivalent of Marine Le Pen, who leads the National Rally in France... and there, I made this depressing again. Oh, and even though Labour looks like they'll win, Farage might still win something too, just so we don't get too excited about anything ever.
Mostly this is all to avoid talking about the political situation here in America, which after last Thursday is... <long, drawn-out combination of a sigh and a moan that sounds like part of a human soul escaping a body out of weariness and despair>. Part of this blog project is to capture moments as moments, as the easiest thing to do is to immediately re-contextualize every event in the wake of their effects. We forget really quickly what it was like to live in the middle of a thing, like COVID or the Trump administration (I almost said "the first Trump administration," but I'm not entirely deflated yet) or the first time Lost was on the air or when everyone was going around saying "wassssuuuuuup." The dark times aren't fun to look at, but they deserve to be catalogued.
After the election actually happens and there's a result of some kind, we won't remember with full clarity what it was like in this moment when we weren't sure if, after being mumbly and not incredibly responsive (apparently) in a debate I didn't watch, the sitting president in July of an election year is possibly considering dropping out of a re-election race. We may learn that it was all press-driven slavering and panting based on the fact that the combination of the words BIDEN and DROP and OUT in a headline got them the most views, but the idea was never actually seriously mooted. Or we may learn that the people in the room just let Grampy sleep while they decided Kamala Harris should just swap her name to the top of the ticket and run with what campaign money we have on hand, to... some kind of resolution. I know a lot of people say they'd vote for a toaster if the other option was Donald Trump, but this is America. I'm not sure what a poll would say if they knew the other candidate in question was a lady toaster. There are some things I'm not convinced we're mature enough to do as a country.
The temptation here is to end with "it should be interesting," but that's a weird euphemism for "please no more news, I may shit myself."
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